Non-culmination and Serial Verb Construction in Korean

In English the inherent result of a lexical causative (e.g. open and burn) must occur for a sentence headed by the verb to be true; it is simply contradictory to say, for example, that John opened a door, but it was not opened or that John burned a book, but it was not burned. By contrast, the corresponding sentences in some other languages are acceptable (e.g. Thai, Tamil, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, and Salish languages), and the sentences are said to be interpreted as non-culmination (more specifically, zero result). Korean is one of those languages (Park 1993; Y-S. Lee 2004; J. Lee 2015; Martin 2016; Beavers and Lee In press). Although non-culmination research has recently attracted much attention, most studies on it in the literature have focused on lexical causatives. This paper aims to extend the coverage of non-culmination research to serial verbs, which are considered typical complex predicates in Korean. Particularly, it is shown, following J. Lee (2015), that V1 (the first verb) of a serial verb construction does not allow zero result, but V2 (the second verb) does. To account for this difference, I propose in this paper the Final Event Hypothesis that only the final subevent in the event structure of a causative predicate is cancelable whether the predicate encodes a direct or indirect causation. Some predictions of this hypothesis and an alternative hypothesis in J. Lee (2015) are tested with other similar data and resultative constructions in Korean, which I argue further supports the Final Event Hypothesis.